kernel woos

Alright, so I have compiled the linux kernel 32485902483 times, and failed. Big deal! So I took it upon my hands to explore this uncharted territory that I've always feared.
Okay now I am too bored to continue giving a background and how I sucked at that for last 3 years. Lets jump right to the point.

The problems I faced and solutions are below. All though you can search the same error string on google and get the same results that i am posting (thats what I did :)).

linux 2.6.19:
error: kernel panic saying "enforcing enabled but no policies"
fix: disable enforcing. add enforcing=0 in /boot/grub/grub.conf at the end of the line "kernel..."

linux 2.6.9:
kernel panic:
Cannot open root device "LABEL=/" or unknown-block(0,0)

fix: this has lots of fixes covered at
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=269230
What worked for me was increasing my block dev ramsize! Apparently sometimes ramdisk is too small for initrd to fit in (or so I understand). So solution,
grep BLK_DEV_RAM /usr/src/linux/.config
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM_SIZE=8192

Add the above 2 lines to your kernel config.